


Lilac Lily

by Florchis



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M, Family Fluff, Hair Dyeing, Quakerider Writers Guild
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:01:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28903800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Florchis/pseuds/Florchis
Summary: Fitz comes home to find his daughter and wife nowhere to be seen until he is taken by storm by a purple bout of energy.
Relationships: Leo Fitz/Skye | Daisy Johnson
Comments: 5
Kudos: 28





	Lilac Lily

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Quakerider Writers Guild Valentine Challenge. My prompt was "Lilac, a flower symbolizing Joy of youth". 
> 
> A big thank you to @Al for Lily's name as an homage to May (because the lily is the flower of the month of May) and in general to the AOS support group Discord chat for helping me come out with the plot for this :)

The house is uncharacteristically quiet and dark when he walks in, and Fitz tries his best to not freak out. 

It is hard to stay calm when you have pasts like his and Daisy’s, but that is exactly the reason why he has to not panic. Either nothing happened or something did, and him going down a spiral of anxiety would be inconvenient in either of those situations.

“Daisy? Lily?” He walks through the house switching lights on, and he relaxes at seeing the colorful papers full of scribbles along with the pencils and two half-full glasses of orange juice on the coffee table. They probably got distracted by something that prevented them from cleaning up and it got dark before they thought about turning on the lights. He refuses to think about any other possibility. “Girls, are you home?”

“Daddy!” A blur of motion and color comes running from the bathroom and crashes against his knees. Fitz feels too relieved to even say anything besides a soft ‘oomph’ at the collision and instead squeezes the shoulders of his daughter affectionately in greeting.

“Monkey, what did we say about being careful with daddy’s work clothes?” Fitz raises his head, following Daisy’s voice with his eyes. She is standing near the bathroom door, but since neither nor the bathroom nor the hallway were on his lightning rampage, he can only see the silhouette of her.

“Sorry, mom,” Lily replies sheepishly, and just when Fitz is about to ask what they are talking about, he sees it: a streaked lilac stain on the top of his trousers. He frowns because Lily’s hands are actually holding the back of his thighs, how could she have possibly managed to put this paint on him, but then the realization hits him: the stain didn’t come from Lily’s hands but from her hair.

Because instead of her usual mane of dark brown hair, their daughter’s head is full of bright purple hair.

The vision brings a flashback of the past to his memory-  _ tiny Fitz, hands full of grease, being scolded by Alistair because he had stained the couch _ -, brief but strong enough to make him want to steady himself. So he sits down on the floor, right there in the middle of their living room, and though he knows that his lower back will scream at him later, it’s worth it just because of Lily’s shrieking joy when he pulls her on his lap.

“Little monkey, did you do this yourself?” he questions fingering a loose strand of her hair. It leaves a faint trace of purple on his finger pad just from lightly touching it, and now Fitz notices the stained towel on top of Lily’s shoulders: he interrupted them in the middle of the process. 

“Mom helped,” she replies with a grin, and Fitz looks for complicity in Daisy but she is nowhere to be seen- instead, he can hear the shower running in the bathroom. “Do you like it?”

“I always think you are the prettiest girl in the world.” He doesn’t even have to lie to her about it: he honestly believes it. “But more important: do _ you  _ like it?”

“Yes!”

“Then I think it is awesome.” And to add emphasis to his point, he offers her a raised palm for a high-five. Lilly bumps her fist against it with a giggle. If he ever had any doubt about her being his daughter, this would clear all of them.

“Mom has a surprise too,” Lily whispers at him conspiratorially, but Fitz doesn’t have enough time to ask her to tell him more before Daisy interrupts them.

“Sweets, it’s time to rinse it. Are you ready?”

Lily goes running to her mom wiggling excitedly, and Fitz is left there sitting alone on their living room floor, clothes full of purple streaks, his head tilted to the side in consideration.

When Daisy came out of the bathroom to take Lily with her, she was wearing a shower cap.

* * *

It’s not after they have eaten dinner and put Lily down with a bedtime story that Fitz finally catches a break to ask Daisy about it. 

He was not wrong: under the shower cap, Daisy had put on herself the same dye as Lily, and though the rinsing has toned down the color to more of a lilac than a purple shade, it’s still a flashy, bold move that surprised Fitz quite a bit.

“Sorry for your clothes,” she is the one to start the conversation while they are working together to wash and dry the dishes. “I tried to put a bathing cap on her too, but-” 

“She doesn’t do well with things in her head, I know.” He gives her a minute to see if she wants to say something else, but Daisy remains silent, her eyes fixed on her hands lost in a cumulus of soap foam. “Is that why you said yes? Because she doesn’t get to wear other things that girls usually wear on their hair?”

Daisy shrugs, and a rogue soap bubble lands on the tip of her nose. Fitz does not pop it but instead watches in amusement all the adorable faces Daisy pulls to try to get it to go away without using her hands and making everything worse.

“Maybe. It also doesn’t hurt anyone, and she was so enthusiastic about it…” She seems lost in thought, and Fitz gives her shoulder an amicable bump to bring her back to the conversation. “Do you think I should have said no?”

It’s Fitz’s turn to shrug. 

“School is out, what is the worst that could happen? The hair dye impulse spreading through our friends’ children like a forest fire? I am not worried about that.” He waits till Daisy closes the tap and dries her hands to circle her with his arms. “I am more interested in knowing why you did yours.”

Daisy rests her head against his shoulder, and Fitz can’t even care if there is still rogue dye in her hair waiting to stain everything around it- he will throw away all his shirts if that is the price to hold her like this. 

“She asked for it. We went to buy the dye. We started doing it. And suddenly she started worrying if people would laugh at her for having different hair from anyone else.” Fitz stiffs but does his best to conceal it. He blames himself and his long-term abandonment issues and anxiety for many of Lily’s trials and tribulations. Daisy blames herself and her past and her literal alien physiology for the same. They both know what the other thinks and believe those ideas to be ludicrous. It still doesn’t change what each one believes. “And I asked her if she thought people would laugh at me, and she said no, so I told her I was going to do it too.”

Such a Daisy thing to do. Putting herself in the middle of someone she loves and danger, without caring if that danger is hypothetical laughter or a bullet. When Lily was a tiny baby, he used to often thank her for everything she did for their child, but Daisy soon told him that she didn’t like to be thanked for loving someone. So instead of saying thank you, Fitz presses with his hands on her scapulae, wanting to feel her closer, and he relaxes a little when her breathing starts to regularize.

It takes her a couple of minutes to start talking again. “I was worried at first about all the stereotypes, but seeing how happy she is with it makes everything worth it. Reminds me that I have one and only one life. And if I want to dye my hair purple to make my daughter happy, I can and will do it.” Fitz hums against her hair. Daisy takes a deep breath and pushes a little on his chest to put enough distance between them to watch him in the eyes. “Which drove me to another realization.”

_ Okay, Fitz. She has been cuddling against you until a literal second ago. No need to panic. _

“Hhm, what realization?”

Instead of replying, Daisy tilts her chin and brings their mouths together. Even after seven years of marriage, she never fails to take his breath away with every kiss. When they break apart, it still takes him an extra second to be able to open his eyes again, and when he does Daisy is smiling at him. 

“We are not getting any younger, you know.” Fitz licks his lips to gain a moment more to recover his composure but she beats him to ask what she means. “Let’s have another baby.”

A bout of coughing overcomes him and Daisy laughs, luckily taking it not as a negative but as the signal of surprise it actually is. She palms his back sympathetically and even with the cough gone it takes his breath away again to see how sure she looks.

“How about we sleep on it today and talk about it tomorrow while Lily is at May’s?”

Daisy laces her fingers with his and pulls him towards their bedroom.

“Sounds like a plan.”

(The purple stains in his work clothes don’t wash off well. He doesn’t care, and by the time Anthony is born, the three of them go purple again in celebration at Lily’s request.)


End file.
